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* <big>{{vi-nom|{{linktext|家}}}}</big> ''gia'' home; family.
* <big>{{vi-nom|{{linktext|家}}}}</big> ''gia'' home; family.
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==Han texts==
[[File:Tale of Kieu, vol. 24, p.22.jpg|thumb|A page from ''[[The Tale of Kieu]]'' by [[Nguyen Du]]. This novel was first published in 1820, and it is the best-known work in Nom. The edition shown was printed in the late 19th century.]]
*[[Nguyễn Trãi]], ''Gia huấn ca'' ("The Family Training Ode"), a Confucian morality poem written in the 1420s.
* Đặng Trần Côn, ''[[Chinh phụ ngâm|Lament of A Soldier's Wife]]''
* Ngô Sĩ Liên, ''[[Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư|Complete Annals of Dai Viet]]''
* Trần Thế Pháp, ''[[Lĩnh Nam chích quái|Wondrous Tales of Linh Nam]]''
* [[Lê Quý Đôn]], ''Vân đài loại ngữ'' (an encyclopedia)
* Lê Quý Đôn, ''Frontier Chronicles''


==Nom texts==
==Nom texts==

Revision as of 12:22, 31 May 2013

The blue script is modern Vietnamese ([quốc ngữ] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), while the characters in brown and green are Han-Nom. It says, "My mother eats vegetarian food at the temple every Sunday."[1]

Template:Contains Nom text Hán-Nôm, or Sino-Vietnamese characters,[2] are characters that were commonly used in Vietnam from the second century BC until the early 20th century. The script could be used to write either Classical Chinese ([Hán văn] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), or a form of Vietnamese called Nom ([chữ Nôm] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)).[3][4] It includes both Chinese characters and characters based on the principles of Chinese writing, but particular to Vietnam.

Han was used by the court and for other official purposes, following the practice of the Chinese government at that time. The Temple of Literature in Hanoi was the best-known school for the study of Chinese. Students typically studied to pass the civil service examinations so that they might become magistrates.

In Nom, Chinese characters are used to write Vietnamese. A Vietnamese word can be written using a Chinese character for a word with a similar meaning or pronunciation. It is thus an ideographic script, although each character represents only one syllable. Vietnamese is a tonal language, and it has far more distinct syllables than other East Asian languages do.[5] Japanese and Korean, both non-tonal languages, developed phonetic scripts to supplement Chinese-based script long before Vietnam did.

In the 1920s, Han-Nom was replaced by Vietnamese alphabet, a Latin-based script that indicates tone. Unlike South Korea and Japan, modern Vietnam does not require students to study the traditional characters.[3] Fewer than 100 scholars worldwide can read Nom.[6] However, Han-Nom calligraphy remains popular as a home decoration and as a symbol of good luck.[3] The Han-Nom Research Institute in Hanoi, founded in 1970, collects and studies relevant manuscripts.[4] It has also created a standard for computer encoding.

Han-Nom
Vietnamese name
Vietnamese alphabetHán Nôm
Hán-Nôm漢喃

History

A page from the bilingual dictionary Nhật dụng thường đàm (1851). Characters representing words in Hán (Chinese) are explained in Nôm (Vietnamese).

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han Empire conquered the country in 111 BC. Independence was achieved in 939, but the Chinese writing system was adopted for official purposes in 1010.[5] A bell engraved in 1076 is the earliest known example of a Nom inscription.[7] Nguyen Thuyen, who composed poetry in the 13th century, is sometimes given credit as the creator of Nom. However, none of his work has survived.[5] The oldest surviving Nom text is the collected poetry of Emperor Tran Nhan Tong written in the 13th century.[8] The Ming occupation of Vietnam (1407-1428) was highly destructive, and few Nom inscriptions survive from earlier times.[9] Nguyen Trai (1380–1442) wrote both Han and Nom literature in the 15th century.[9]

Nom was not studied or classified systematically for most of its history.[10] Instead, authors who had studied Chinese applied the principles of Chinese writing to their native language. In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd wrote a Nom dictionary that eventually gained wide acceptance and circulation.[11] In the 19th century, there was a flowering of popular literature written in Nom, including such classics as Nguyen Du's The Tale of Kieu and the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Although only 3 to 5 percent of the population was literate,[12] nearly every village had someone who could read Nom aloud for the benefit of other villagers.[13]

In Korea and Japan, the traditional writing system was simplified so it could be taught to the general public.[10] These nations created only a few hundred original characters.[5] Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nom as inferior to Han, so it was not interested in doing the work required to turn Nom into a form of writing suitable for mass communication.[14] Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language and has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables.[5] Neither the Korean nor the Japanese writing systems indicate tones, so they cannot be applied to the Vietnamese language.[15] As in Chinese, a semantic meaning is attributed to every syllable. This characteristic of the language may be can considered a result of the traditional writing system.[16]

As additional characters were created by combining pre-existing elements, Nom grew more complex.[5] One element might suggest Vietnamese pronunciation, while the other could be derived from a Chinese character with similar meaning. For example, the reading ba is indicated by the character 巴. In Chinese, this character indicates the same sound as in Vietnamese, but it's meaning is unrelated: "to long for". For the character 𠀧 (⿺巴三), horizontal lines are added to indicate that the meaning is "three." "Father" is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿰父巴). "Turtle" is con ba ba (昆蚆蚆; ⿰虫巴). The Chinese also combined phonetic and semantic elements to create Han characters in ancient times. As the correspondence between sound and meaning is different in Vietnamese than it is in ancient Chinese, Nom involved the creation of thousands of additional characters. A set of nearly 20,000 characters has been proposed for a computer encoding standard, over 6,000 of these specific to Vietnam.[17][18]

Beginning in the late 19th century, the French colonial authorities promoted the use of the Vietnamese alphabet, which they viewed as a stepping stone toward learning French. Language reform movements in other Asian nations stimulated Vietnamese interest in the subject. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan was increasingly cited as a model for modernization. The Confucian examination system was compared unfavorably to the Japanese system of public education. The popularity of Hanoi's short-lived Tonkin Free School suggested that broad reform was possible. In 1910, the colonial school system adopted a "Franco-Vietnamese curriculum", which emphasized French and alphabetic Vietnamese. The teaching of Chinese characters was discontinued in 1917.[19] On December 28, 1918, Emperor Khai Dinh declared that the traditional writing system no longer had official status.[19] The civil service exam was given for the last time at the imperial capital of Hue on January 4, 1919.[19] The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years.[19] China itself abandoned Han soon afterward as part of the May Fourth Movement.

Most common characters

The following are the fifty most common characters in Nom literature.[20] The modern spelling is given in italics.

  • 羅 là to be
  • 吧 và and
  • 各 các each; every
  • 没 một one
  • 固 có there is
  • 𧵑 của of
  • 得 được to get
  • 𥪝 trong in
  • 𤄯 trong clear
  • 𠊛 (or 𠊚) người people
  • 忍 những (plural marker)
  • 學 học to learn
  • 如 như as
  • 詞 từ word
  • 會 hội to meet
  • 咍 hay or; good
  • 空 không not
  • 体 thể body
  • 四 tư four
  • 拱 cũng also
  • 𠇍 với with
  • 朱 cho to give
  • 社 xã society, company
  • 尼 này, nơi place
  • 底 để to place
  • 關 quan frontier, barrier, gate
  • 觀 quan to see
  • 場 trường school
  • 本 bản composition
  • 𧗱 về to return; about
  • 經 kinh classic works
  • 行 hàng, hãng, hành, hạnh company, firm
  • 航 hàng sail; navigate
  • 産 sản to give birth
  • 𠚢 ra to get out
  • 世 thế world; era
  • 替 thế to replace
  • 勢 thế position, power; like that, so
  • 常 thường frequent; common, normal, usual
  • 事 sự matter; event
  • 妬 đó there; that
  • 濟 tế to run
  • 濟 tế border
  • 頭 đầu head; top (of a multitude)
  • 投 đầu to throw, to send
  • 𦓡 mà but
  • 恪 khác another; further
  • 一 nhất first
  • 旦 đến, đán day, morning
  • 家 gia home; family.

Nom texts

  • Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kieu (1820)
  • Nguyễn Trãi, Quốc âm thi tập ("National Language Poetry Compilation")
  • Phạm Đình Hồ, Nhật Dụng Thường Đàm (1851). A Hán-to-Nôm dictionary for Vietnamese speakers.
  • Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Lục Văn Tiên (19th century)
  • Đặng Trần Côn, Chinh Phụ Nghâm Khúc (18th century)
  • Hồ Xuân Hương (18th century) female poet

Computer encoding

In 1993, the Vietnamese government released an 8-bit coding standard for alphabetic Vietnamese (TCVN 5712:1993, or VSCII), as well as a 16-bit standard for Nom (TCVN 5773:1993).[21] This group of glyphs is referred to as "V0." In 1994, the Ideographic Rapporteur Group agreed to include Nom characters as part of Unicode.[22] A revised standard, TCVN 6909:2001, defines 9,299 glyphs.[23] About half of these glyphs are specific to Vietnam.[23] Nom characters not already encoded were added to Unicode Extension B.[23] (These characters have five-digit hexadecimal codepoints. The characters that were encoded earlier have four-digit hex.)

Code Characters Unicode block Standard Date V Source Sources
V0 2,246 Basic Block (593), A (138), B (1,515) TCVN 5773:1993 2001 V0-3021 to V0-4927 5
V1 3,311 Basic Block (3,110), C (1) TCVN 6056:1995 1999 V1-4A21 to V1-6D35 2, 5
V2 3,205 Basic Block (763), A (151), B (2,291) VHN 01:1998 2001 V2-6E21 to V2-9171 2, 5
V3 535 Basic Block (91), A (19), B (425) VHN 02:1998 2001 V3-3021 to V3-3644 Manuscripts
V4 785 (encoded) Extension C Defined as sources 1, 3, and 6 2009 V4-4021 to V4-4B2F 1, 3, 6
V04 1,028 Extension E Unencoded V4 and V6 characters Projected V04-4022 to V04-583E V4: 1, 3, 6;
V6: 4, manuscripts
V5 ~900 Proposed in 2001, but already coded 2001 None 2, 5
Sources: Nguyễn Quang Hồng,[23] "Unibook Character Browser," Unicode,Inc., "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E" (N4358-A).[24]

Characters were extracted from the following sources:

  1. Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày [Nom of the Tay People], 2003.
  2. Institute of Linguistics, Bảng tra chữ Nôm [Nom Index], Hanoi, 1976.
  3. Nguyễn Quang Hồng, editor, Tự điển chữ Nôm [Nom Dictionary], 2006.
  4. Father Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt [Help with Nom and Sino-Vietnamese], 2004.
  5. Vũ Văn Kính & Nguyễn Quang Xỷ, Tự điển chữ Nôm [Nom Dictionary], Saigon, 1971.
  6. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm miền Nam [Table of Nom in the South], 1994.
  7. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm sau thế kỷ XVII [Table of Nom in the 17th Century], 1994.
  8. Vũ Văn Kính, Đại tự điển chữ Nôm [Great Nom Dictionary], 1999.
  9. Nguyễn Văn Huyên, Góp phần nghiên cứu văn hoá Việt Nam [Contributions to the Study of Vietnamese Culture], 1995.[23]

The V2, V3, and V4 proposals were developed by a group at the Han-Nom Research Institute led by Nguyễn Quang Hồng.[23] V4, developed in 2001, includes over 400 ideograms formerly used by the Tay people of northern Vietnam.[23] This allows the Tay language to get its own registration code.[23] V5 is a set of about 900 characters proposed in 2001.[23] As these characters were already part of Unicode, the IRG concluded that they could not be edited and no Vietnamese code was added.[23] (This is despite the fact that national codes were added retroactively for version 3.0 in 1999.) The Nom Na Group, led by Ngô Thanh Nhàn, published a set of nearly 20,000 Nom characters in 2005.[17] This set includes both the characters proposed earlier and a large group of additional characters referred to as "V6".[23] These are mainly Han characters from Trần Văn Kiệm's dictionary which were already assigned codepoints. Character readings were determined manually by Hồng's group, while Nhàn's group developed software for this purpose.[25] The work of the two groups was integrated and published in 2008 as the Hán Nôm Coded Character Repertoire.[25]

Character Composition Nom reading Han Viet English Codepoint V Source Other sources
吧 ⿰口巴 ba ba [emphatic final particle] U+5427 V0-3122 G0,J,KP,K,T
傷 ⿰忄昜 thương thương to love U+50B7 V1-4C22 G1,J,KP,K,T
𠊛 ⿰㝵人 người ngại (碍) people U+2029B V2-6E4F None
㤝 ⿰忄充 suông song to become interested in U+391D V3-313D G3,KP,K,T
𫋙 ⿰虫強 càng cường (強) more, less U+2B2D9 V4-536F None
⿰朝乙 giàu trào (朝) wealth Not assigned V04-405E None
⿰米頗 ⿰米頗 phở phả (頗) noodle soup Not assigned V04-5055 None
Key: G0 = China (GB 2312); G1 = China (GB 12345); G3 = China (GB 7589); GHZ = Hanyu Da Zidian; J = Japan; KP= North Korea; K = South Korea; T = Taiwan.
Sources: Unihan Database, Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E" (N4358-A).[24].

The characters that do not exist in Chinese have Han-Viet readings that are based on the characters given in parenthesis. The common character for càng (強) contains the radical 虫 (insects).[26] This radical is added redundantly to create 𫋙, a rare variation shown in the chart above. The character (giàu) is specific to the Tay people.[27] It is not yet part of the Unicode character set.[28] It is a variation of 朝, the corresponding character in Vietnamese.[29]

References

  1. ^ A diacritic is off. It should be, Mẹ tôi thường ăn chay ở chùa mỗi chủ Nhật.
  2. ^ Langenscheidt's Pocket Dictionary Vietnamese, p. 126. 2002. "Hán-Nôm Sino-Vietnamese characters."
  3. ^ a b c Hoang Trang-Lan Nguyen, "Vietnamese neglect Han-Nom heritage", Viet Nam News, February 14, 2012.
  4. ^ a b Noboyuki, Matsuo, "The Han Nom Institute, Hanoi", Asian Research Trends: a Humanities and Social Science Review Yunesuko Higashi Ajia Bunka Kenkyū Sentā (Tokyo, Japan), 1998, No. 8-10, p. 140, "Most of the source materials from premodern Vietnam are written in Chinese, obviously using Chinese characters; however, a portion of the literary genre is written in Vietnamese, using chu nom. Therefore, han nom is the term designating the whole body of premodern written materials."
  5. ^ a b c d e f Hanna, Wm C., Asia's orthographic dilemma, University of Hawaii Press (1997), pp. 78-79, 82.
  6. ^ "What is Nôm?", Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
  7. ^ Trịnh Khắc Mạnh, "Chữ Nôm và kho chữ Hán Nôm mã hóa", Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
  8. ^ Template:Vi Trần Nhân Tông, Cư trần lạc đạo phú
  9. ^ a b Mark W. McLeod, Thi Dieu Nguyen, Culture and Customs of Vietnam, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001, p. 68.
  10. ^ a b Marr, David, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, 1984, pp. 141-142. "Known subsequently as nom, this unique Vietnamese script unfortunately remained even more unwieldy than the Chinese from which it was spawned. Unlike Japanese kana or Korean hangul, there was no process of character simplification that resulted in a basic set of phonemes or syllables."
  11. ^ Taberd, J.L., Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum, 1838. This is a revision of a dictionary by Pierre-Joseph Pigneau de Béhain published in 1772-1773. A reprint in 1884 was quite successful.
  12. ^ Hanna, p. 78.
  13. ^ Marr, p. 142.
  14. ^ Marr, p. 142. "More important, however, was the attitude of most Vietnamese literati, who continued to regard Chinese as the ultimate in civilized communication and thus considered nom a form of recreation...Meanwhile, the minority of the literati who took nom writing seriously had to be careful not to offend the fraternity or be accused of subversion through circulating 'vulgar' texts."
  15. ^ Marr, pp. 141. "Some of the problem lay in the tonal and nonagglutinative nature of Vietnamese as contrasted with Japanese or Korean."
  16. ^ Hanna, p. 77. "As a matter of fact, Vietnamese is no more monosyllabic than Chinese or other languages....What Vietnamese does share with Chinese is a monosyllabic morphology that, in my view, evolved in both languages under the influence of Chinese characters."
  17. ^ a b Thanh Nhàn Ngô, Manual, the Nôm Na Coded Character Set, Nôm Na Group, Hanoi, 2005. The set contains 19,981 characters.
  18. ^ Trần Văn Kiệm's dictionary has a total of 17,761 characters (See "Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán-Việt - Văn phòng Nôm Na".) Lê Quý Ngưu's Đại Tự Điển Chữ Nôm (2007) has over 19,000 characters.
  19. ^ a b c d Template:Vi Phùng Thành Chủng, "Hướng tới 1000 năm Thăng Long-Hà Nội", November 12, 2009.
  20. ^ "Comparison of Character Sets", Chunom.org
  21. ^ Luong Van Phan, "Country Report on Current Status and Issues of e-government Vietnam – Requirements for Documentation Standards". The character list for the 1993 standard is given in Nôm Proper Code Table: Version 2.1 by Ngô Thanh Nhàn.
  22. ^ "Han Unification History", The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0 (2006).
  23. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Template:Vi Nguyễn Quang Hồng, "Giới thiệu Kho chữ Hán Nôm mã hoá" [Encoding of Han-Nom Fonts], Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
  24. ^ a b "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E", (N4358-A), JTC1/SC2/WG2, Oct. 10, 2012.
  25. ^ a b Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies and Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, Kho Chữ Hán Nôm Mã Hoá [Hán Nôm Coded Character Repertoire] (2008).
  26. ^ Template:Vi Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt [Help with Nom and Sino-Vietnamese], 2004, "Entry càng", p. 290.
  27. ^ Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày [Nom of the Tay People], 2003, p. 178.
  28. ^ The character is part of the proposed set for Extension E. See "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E", (N4358-A), JTC1/SC2/WG2, Oct. 10, 2012, p. 5.
  29. ^ Detailed information: V+63830", Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
    "List of Unicode Radicals", VNPF.
    Kiệm, 2004, p. 424, "Entry giàu."
    Entry giàu", VDict.com.

Fonts

Some characters in this article may require the installation of an additional font to display properly:

  • Hanamin B  –This Japanese font supports nearly 90,000 characters, including those in Unicode CJK Extension C.
  • NomNaTongLight – This font, created by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, is based on characters found in traditional Vietnamese wood-block prints.
  • Han Nom Font Set – This open source font supports over 70,000 Unicode CJK codepoints.
  • Fonts for Chu Nom. How to display and use Han-Nom characters.
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